Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

OP-ED: The Power China Is Building, By Gary Schmitt, Washington Post, June 14, 2007; Page A27

Schmitt, whom I've meet, pushes very hard for a much larger U.S. military budget. To do that, he must sell all current responsibilities plus all possible enemy images.

Notice in this piece how he doesn't make any direct money comparisons, instead offering the scary image of "scores" of modernized platforms China is buying that are--in reality--nothing more than stuff they buy primarily from the Russians. If the Sovs never matched us, how does China buying Russian stuff in vastly smaller numbers match us? Our focus should be--as always--on capabilities, not numbers. No commander of PACOM, for example, would trade our sub fleet for China's. Fallon and others have stated that China is nowhere near matching our capabilities in the region, much less elsewhere.

The larger notion that somehow America stands "in the way" of China is a bit much. Please name a spot where we'll stop China from doing trade, because we won't even consider that on Iran, so does anyone think we'll go to the mattresses on Zimbabwe or Sudan?

As an assertion of conflicting strategic interests, it does not fly. Schmitt offers no economic or trade analysis of China's already massive and growing interdependency with the American economy, because none matches his preference to add China on top of the Long War as a compelling requirement.

America can't manage a Cold War-like rivalry with China plus a Long War against radical extremism, and frankly, China can't come close to managing either, given its hundreds of millions living on less than a dollar a day and their supremely rapidly rising elder population. Run the numbers down the road and they simply do not compute.

But Schmitt unabashedly wants a far larger U.S. Defense budget and makes no bones about it, so China's "scores" of Russian platforms must impress. But as someone who spent some time studying Soviet military capabilities, especially naval ones, I remain unimpressed.

China's capabilities place it in the same zip code as Britain's in numbers, but hardly in skills (frankly, I'd take India's navy over China's). Ask yourself what Britain can manage right now as an independent global power and what it would take from the Brits to "stand in our way" as a hostile one and you'll get a sense of the huge capabilities gap that still remains.

As China rises, we can choose to shape that rise, or we can try to counter it. What we can't do is prevent it.

Frankly, what we suffer with China most right now is its free-riding on our own vast global security efforts. The only cure for that is to engage them toward more effort in similar areas.

Or we can pick a fight or start up an arms race. Which path strikes you as getting America what it wants and which gets Osama what he wants?

If you want Schmitt's path, you need to be able to argue how China can get rich before it gets old before its gets seriously capable of threatening us somewhere besides Taiwan, AND THEN how it maintains that wealth and economic power, despite the aging, in hostile opposition to the U.S., somehow shielded from a global economy that we still dominate but from which it has somehow detached itself in some coherent, alternative economic bloc, thus allowing a consistently hostile policy toward America (and if you're going to push a China-running-the-global-economy scenario, then I say, "Put down that crack pipe!"). Just think that one through and lay out a plausible political, social, environmental, technological, demographic,and ECONOMIC scenario in addition to Schmitt's preferred security scenario based on a sheer "dramatically rising defense budget" that still, in total, doesn't match our military-industrial complex's vast R&D spending alone.

And then we can have a real conversation.

If you think that at-sea naval battles using subs versus carriers is the future of 21st century warfare, much less the essential basis of our power competition with China, then we must certainly spend a lot more money building naval platforms. With globalization and the continuing reality of nukes, however, I just don't see that vision providing us much security coverage in the complex future unfolding before us. But a lot of analysts prefer old wars to new ones. Me, I'm more interested in China's capacity for cyber attacks than torpedoes, because I just don't see Beijing engaging in lengthy conventional scenarios with us (and no, cyber plus a rapid conventional engagement does not buy wins, it just gives you something new to defend in what inevitably ends up being an untenable conventional fight--to wit, our situation in Iraq).

Underestimating our strengths and overestimating those of others is a sure way to lose the resource utilization contest over time, so interpreting our relationship/competition with China solely on the basis of defense budgets is a bad idea. Extrapolating motives from them is even worse.

After all, who spends most and who wars most? China's last serious military intervention was in 1979, almost three decades ago. Care to guess our number since then?

Our willingness to use our forces is our greatest strength. We know ops, and we're confident in doing them. Count up purchase numbers if you want, but I prefer usable, experienced troops and commanders with actual combat experience. When China can rapidly insert 50,000 combat troops in Africa or SWA and support them over time, then we'll have a different conversation. Most people have no idea what that entails, but Chinese strategists do.

Thanks to Barry Kaplovitz for sending this.